1- Academic Ethics: Is ‘Diversity’ the Best Reason for Affirmative Action?

What went unnoted is that most Anglophone philosophy departments offer little or no coverage of most of Western philosophy of the past two centuries, from Hegel to Nietzsche to Habermas. Leading philosophy departments from Princeton to Oxford are, indeed, not very intellectually diverse, but their lack of diversity reflects no submerged racial or ethnic motivation: It reflects, instead, the evolution of a discipline — hugely shaped by refugees from Nazism, ironically — that moved closer to the natural sciences than the other humanities in its conception of method.

No one, to my knowledge, is complaining about lack of attention to "Chinese" physics in American physics departments, which suggests that here, again, diversity is being invoked opportunistically to avoid a substantive debate about the merits of alternative methods and substantive views, or the virtues of specialization in a particular method. As Thomas Kuhn famously observed many years ago, "normal science" often makes great progress when there is not diversity, but convergence on methods, assumptions, and problems.

Arizona school officials violated the constitutional rights of a 13-year-old girl when they strip-searched her on the suspicion she might be hiding ibuprofen in her underwear, the Supreme Court ruled yesterday. The decision put school districts on notice that such searches are "categorically distinct" from other efforts to combat illegal drugs.

In a case that had drawn attention from educators, parents and civil libertarians across the country, the court ruled 8 to 1 that such an intrusive search without the threat of a clear danger to other students violated the Constitution's protections against unreasonable search or seizure.

Justice David H. Souter, writing perhaps his final opinion for the court, said that in the search of Savana Redding, now a 19-year-old college student, school officials overreacted to vague accusations that Redding was violating school policy by possessing the ibuprofen, equivalent to two tablets of Advil.

What was missing, Souter wrote, "was any indication of danger to the students from the power of the drugs or their quantity, and any reason to suppose that Savana was carrying pills in her underwear."

It was reasonable to search the girl's backpack and outer clothes, but Safford Middle School administrators made a "quantum leap" in taking the next step, the opinion said. "The meaning of such a search, and the degradation its subject may reasonably feel, place a search that intrusive in a category of its own demanding its own specific suspicions," Souter wrote.

Justice Clarence Thomas was the lone dissenter. "Judges are not qualified to second-guess the best manner for maintaining quiet and order in the school environment," he wrote.

He said administrators were only being logical in searching the girl. "Redding would not have been the first person to conceal pills in her undergarments," he wrote. "Nor will she be the last after today's decision, which announces the safest place to secrete contraband in school."

The court's virtual unanimity was in contrast to the intense oral argument that seemed to exasperate the court's only female member, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. She later said her male colleagues seemed not to appreciate the trauma such a search would have on a developing adolescent.

"They have never been a 13-year-old girl," she told USA Today when asked about her colleagues' comments during the arguments. "It's a very sensitive age for a girl. I didn't think that my colleagues, some of them, quite understood."

But yesterday's opinion recognized just that. "Changing for gym is getting ready for play," Souter wrote. "Exposing for a search is responding to an accusation reserved for suspected wrongdoers" and is so degrading that a number of states and school districts have banned strip searches. The Washington region's two largest school districts are among them.

I've linked to Ginsburg before, making the same point; ditto Leiter.
But it's not often Leiter's so direct in defending scientistic arguments for philosophy. But saying that would be ignoring his reference to Kuhn.